Split life defined Headley, says FBI

Published: Thursday, December 10, 2009, 14:08 [IST]

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Chicago, Dec.10 (ANI): Alleged Mumbai terror attack conspirator David Coleman Headley lived in two worlds - using a fake name and a fake job to help a terrorist group in Pakistan plan the 2008 Mumbai attack and a potential attack against a Danish newspaper, the FBI says.

Posing as an employee of First World Services with the help of the owner, Headley travelled the world, scouting locations for the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai that killed 170 people and planning a strike against the Danish newspaper that published controversial cartoons of Islam's Prophet Muhammad in 2005, prosecutors say.

Headley was arrested in October and charged with conspiring to attack the Danish newspaper.

On Monday, he was charged in the Mumbai case, as well. Wednesday, he pleaded not guilty at an arraignment in Chicago.

According the Christian Science Monitor, the FBI believes he was in direct contact with senior terrorist leaders abroad, as opposed to lower-level go-betweens.

He flitted between the US and Pakistan, and Chicago was the home base for his terrorist exploits, the FBI says.

Headley carried bogus First World business cards to gain entry to Jyllands-Posten, the Copenhagen newspaper, sometime between December 2008 and January 2009, where he said he had interest in placing an advertisement, prosecutors say.

In Copenhagen he took videos of the newspaper's exterior, a synagogue believed to be attended by the newspaper's editor as well as the city's central train station, according to the FBI.

Although federal authorities say Headley did not show he possessed significant financial resources, he managed to take multiple trips overseas under the ruse of First World. Besides attending several training camps in Pakistan run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, an anti-India terrorist organization there, he displayed the stature of an international businessman.

It is characteristic of a life that has seen many twists and turns. After his birth in the US, the family soon moved to Pakistan, where he was raised and educated at a military school outside Islamabad. His mother, however, returned to the US, and after 10 years in Pakistan Headley broke off his Pakistani education to join her in Philadelphia, where she ran a bar called the Khyber Pass.

Twenty years later, he was convicted of smuggling heroin into the country in Brooklyn and sentenced to 15 months in prison.

During the past few years, Headley communicated with members of Lashkar-e-Taiba through cell phone and e-mail, using coded language that would otherwise describe ordinary business dealings.

Among the terms meant to describe receiving religious redemption were "rich," and making a "profit" while the discussions of both plots were described using words like "investments," "projects," "business," and "action."